Month: March 2005

Trailer for A Good Band is Easy to Kill, a documentary of the final tour of Beulah. Beulah was awesome, and they put on a great, horn-enhanced live show. (Plus there’s a small chance I’ll be in there, based on my vigorous hopping in the third row of a show last year. Although it’s more likely my friend Nicole will be in there, since she somehow ended up on stage, playing tambourine.)

The Sea Nymph Eats Paul Giamatti Alive, a series of possible twist endings to the next M. Night Shyamalan movie.

Not-tremendously-interesting story from today’s paper. Another not-tremendously-interesting story coming in tomorrow’s.
Just as I previously said all right-thinking Dallasites should have been at the Clem Snide show a couple weeks ago, all right-thinking Texans should be at the Decemberists show tomorrow night. You shan’t regret it — they’re terrific live and the new album is aces.
Why the Washington Post is losing circulation. This is the most depressing part of the decline of my line of work: The Post is an amazing newspaper, led by very smart people, and in the perfect newspaper market, but it’s still dropping readers. Awful stuff.
The most annoying part of the article is the scene from the non-reader focus group: “Former subscribers complained unread papers piled up at their homes, making them feel guilty because they hadn’t read them. The responses were not ‘No, I don’t like the Post.’ They were ‘No, I don’t want that hulking thing in my house.'”
I’ve sat in on those focus groups, and I can verify that’s an incredibly common complaint. That idea — that it’s not the content that’s keeping people from reading, it’s the sheer physical artifact — is soooo maddening, since it means there’s not much we on the content side can do to make things better. Harrumph.

Cameron Diaz tries to hip up environmentalism. Line most likely to be quoted from this article: “Ms. Diaz said she and the actress Jessica Alba shared a bed night after night.”

Two more stories today:
– From the front page: “The number of ‘academically unacceptable’ schools in Texas could grow by a factor of 10 under a tougher set of standards approved by a Texas Education Agency committee.
“There are now 92 Texas schools labeled unacceptable, the state’s lowest rating. But if the proposed new rules had been in place last year, more than 1,100 schools would have earned the label and faced possible state intervention.
“‘We’re going to have to go after more schools,’ said Sandy Kress, the former Dallas school board president and Bush adviser who is among the new standards’ supporters. ‘We’re going to have to go to a place we have not gone yet if we really want youngsters to succeed in these ineffective schools.'”
– From the Metro section front: “Former Wilmer-Hutchins Superintendent Charles Matthews was indicted Tuesday for allegedly ordering employees to falsify attendance data.
“The indictment, by a Dallas County grand jury, is the second in the last five months for Dr. Matthews, a former state superintendent of the year. His leadership of the troubled district is the target of numerous federal and state criminal investigations and has led the Texas Education Agency to take over district operations.”
I’m off to New York in a few minutes. Drop me a line if you want to get together while I’m in town.

Best high school basketball shot ever. (Related story.)

And oh yeah: I was on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning. Well, I wasn’t — I was in Mexico when Claudio was in Dallas recording audio — but the whole piece is based on my cheating stories from the last few months.
(There is one kinda funny error in the piece, though: The fellow Claudio calls “Mike Drago,” er, isn’t.)

The reason I was at work until 10 p.m. tonight, from Tuesday’s front page:
The Wilmer-Hutchins school board will soon be out of work.
State Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley has decided to dissolve the troubled district’s board because state investigators found widespread cheating by Wilmer-Hutchins teachers on the state’s TAKS test.
The investigation